by Sharon Maas
Now, with her new scooter, she went everywhere. Armed with a map of London, she disappeared into the concrete wilderness. When this first happened Mum panicked and together we scoured the streets, looking for her. When we returned home there she was, laughing at us. Locked out of the house.
With this new freedom came a new sense of entitlement. It was her right, Gran said, to own a dog.
‘A dog!’ Mum cried.
‘Not a big one. Jus’ one a them lil’ tiny t’ings. I saw a lady in the park today; she had one, just like a toy. I thought it was a puppy but no, it was a real grown up dog. I want one like that.’
‘But I don’t want a dog! I already have a cat. What about Samba? I thought you liked Samba?’
‘Samba is for inside the house, my little dog is to take for walks. I done choose a name for it, Elephant.’
‘Why out of the blue do you want a dog?’
‘It’s not out of the blue. I always wanted a dog, ever since I was a little girl. A dog of my own. My parents didn’t let me. They said dogs is for boys not girls. Them Quints always had a dog, sometimes two. Turtle. Parrot. Kanga. Rabbit. And remember, Rika? Rabbit? Rabbit was your dog.’
‘Not really. Rabbit was the family dog. I wanted the new puppy to be mine alone, but you gave him to the twins. Remember Devil?’
‘Ah, Devil, Devil. Yeh, I remember Devil. And I remember Devil get tame. But that was after you left. You never get to see the new Devil.’
I had to laugh. Girls wanting dogs and not getting them seemed to run in our family. I remembered the fights Mum and I used to have, the tears, the tantrums. But Mum had been adamant. Just as she was now.
‘No dog, and no Elephant!’ said Mum emphatically. ‘And I’m late for work.’
‘Mum!’ I called, as she rushed to the door.
‘What?’
‘Your shirt’s on inside out.’
She looked down.
‘Oh. Oh, thanks, Inky. Where’s my head today’
‘Where it always is. Up in the clouds.’
She made a face, left the room. Her footsteps pounded on the stairs as she dashed up to change.
What would Mum do without me?
‘You’re a good daughter,’ Gran said. ‘Take good care of you mother, like that boy in the poem.’
‘What poem?’
‘James Morrison Weatherby George Dupree – the little boy who took care of his mother, A. A. Milne. You mother didn’t read those poems to you?’
I shook my head. Mum hadn’t read anything to me when I was little; she’d made up stories on the spot. She didn’t like reading aloud, she told me later, but it didn’t matter as I’d loved those made-up stories. Stories of a faraway land she called Back-of-Beyond-Land, the land she’d grown up in. Back then, she’d made it sound like paradise. As a child I’d longed to go there, see for myself the sakiwinki monkeys and hear the six-o’clock bee and the kiskadee. She told stories of crazy, funny people who walked the streets and children who climbed mango trees and caught fish and frogs in alleyways; it was a happy place, the country of her childhood. But that happy place was a figment of her imagination, because later, once I’d grown up, she told me the truth. Real stories. Stories of murder and betrayal and poverty, political mayhem and economic downfall. She convinced me the place was a shambles, not worth even a thought. The paradise she’d created for me as a child came all from her imagination. She’d created a homeland flowing with milk and honey, and the child-me had taken it for real. That was the power of her writing. Back then.
I’d told her to write more stories and get them published, but she always shook her head.
‘Children’s stories don’t come to me any more,’ she’d explained, as if stories landed on her head from outer space.
‘Rika was always a dreamer,’ Gran said now. ‘Never you know what she got in she mind. People like that, you got to watch out for them. Mind what they doing behind you back. Is for they own good, otherwise they ruin they own life. You mother now, Rika, she don’t talk much but she does write. Is what she write you got to watch.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
INKY: THE NOUGHTIES
Gran, we found out, was engaged in a vigorous email correspondence with several Quint great-grand nieces and nephews. She told us all about them. All of them, not surprisingly, were enthusiastic stamp collectors. It’s amazing how many passionate philatelists come crawling out of the family woodwork when a priceless stamp turns up. Two lived in the USA, one in Canada. One lived in Guyana, and seemed her favourite. This girl’s name was Charlotte; she was fifteen, the granddaughter of one of Gran’s myriad Quint brothers-in-law, he himself long dead. Charlotte wrote Gran saccherine-sweet emails on an almost daily basis, several of which Gran read out at the breakfast table for our delectation.
Worse yet, Gran wanted me to connect up with all these dear far-flung second and third cousins of mine. It was high time, she said, that the family closed ranks; that we all got to know and love each other. There was talk of a grand Quint Family Reunion in Miami the following year. Gran bemoaned the fact that the Quints, once such a close-knit family unit, should now be scattered like loose grain all around the globe, knowing nothing of each other, our connections, our roots. And in a way she was right, and no doubt her plan for reunion would have worked, had it not been for the Quint.
It is a well-known fact that nothing so easily destroys family unity like a fat inheritance to be shared or withheld, depending on the whims and moods of one person.
* * *
And I felt it, gnawing at my insides like a virus, the little rodent of greed. Under other circumstances I’d have loved to connect with this huge family Gran was digging out for me. Dad had been an only child with no connections to the one or two uncles and aunts he had. I had grown up without extended family; Mum’s choice, in part, but also a result of the wave of emigration that had swept her home country in the sixties and seventies. She had virtually cut herself off from everyone, and only resumed contact with her original family after I was born.
Gran calculated that now there were over a hundred second, third and even fourth generation Quints in the world. One of them would get the Quint, as our stamp had come to be called by the media. And it wasn’t going to be me. There was a name for the virus eating at my substance.
It was jealousy.
And it wasn’t even about the Quint, or who would get it in the end. It was about her, Gran.
The thing is: I was learning to love her. And she didn’t even know it. I only just found out myself. But all she cared about was the Quint; cared so much that she wasn’t even aware of the false love offered by these long-lost cousins of mine.
The Quint was slowly tearing our family apart. It was if a poison leaked from it, infecting us all with rancour and greed and jealousy.
* * *
Marion called in great agitation. I was suspicious from the start. I didn’t tell her about Gran’s plan to find a suitable heir, of course, but she seemed to know already; probably through the Canadian Quints. Then she said something that clinched it for me.
‘Inky,’ she said, ‘You have to restrain Mummy. She can’t go on like this. Maybe the stamp doesn’t even belong to her.’
I knew it; I was right. Even Marion, sweet, kind Marion, was not immune to the destructive power of the Quint. The only person in the family who did seem immune, in fact, was Mum.
I hoped Marion could feel the coldness in my voice as I answered:
‘Of course it belongs to her. Her husband Humphrey left it to her.’
‘But …’
‘Marion, sorry, I have to go, Gran’s calling,’ I lied. I could not stomach a word more of this conversation. It was betrayal. In my heart I whispered: Et tu, Marion. I cut her off.
* * *
Two weeks after sending it off for validation, we received the news that the Stamp – or the Quint, as it now could officially be named – was indeed genuine. Not only we received that news; the whole philatelic world did,
as well as the British tabloids. Another flurry of attention came Gran’s way, and she played it for all she was worth:
No, she was not selling it, and no, she was not going to keep it in a vault or a safe.
What was she going to do with it, then?
Keep it at home and when she died, leave it to a worthy heir, with strict instructions that it should not be sold.
Was the rumour true, that she kept it on her person, in her purse?
Gran burst into whoops of laughter at that.
‘Y’all think I born yesterday?’
Where, then, was the Quint?
‘Big secret. Only two people in the world know. Me, and one other person.’
I knew who that was; her solicitor. For yes; Gran had engaged a solicitor, one Mr Wainwright, who came around occasionally and locked himself into her room with her and sent her Important-Looking Letters. All Top Secret from us.
The weird thing was, Mum didn’t even care, and it drove me crazy. I really believe that the only thing in her head was that damn novel she was writing – and which I still hadn’t summoned the courage to talk her out of – and her soap-opera dramas. Which were, after all, her daily bread.
Whenever I reminded her to take action – to have a serious talk with Gran about the future of the Quint – she only rolled her eyes and shrugged, or waved her hands in that dismissive butterfly-wing thing.
‘When you think about it, Inky,’ she said to me, ‘All it is, is a scrap of paper. A little tiny scrap of paper any normal person would chuck in the rubbish. Isn’t it crazy, that people run around like headless chickens over a scrap of paper? Isn’t it fascinating, the way we fixate on a thing and out of our own minds, out of desire, instil it with value? I mean, isn’t that where all these problems come from in the first place? Desire?’
‘But, Mum …’
‘Inky, there’s something you don’t understand. This whole drama is not about the stamp at all. It’s about something else. That stamp is only a catalyst. It’s a stand-in. There’s something more going on, something beneath the surface. Relationships. Mummy is playing a game. She’s trying to draw me in, lure me into playing. And I refuse to play.’
It was my turn to roll my eyes. When Mum waxed philosophical and psychological like that it made me want to puke. Thank goodness it didn’t happen too often, for it made communication, a realistic conversation, impossible.
In this case, it meant I had to deal with Gran on my own. Make her see that these sycophantic nieces and nephews of hers were unworthy of the Quint. I had to do it for Mum’s sake. Mum was drowning under a sea of debt, and Gran could save her with a finger-click. It just wasn’t fair.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
RIKA: THE SIXTIES
It was an extremely subdued, red-eyed Rika who knocked on Rajan’s door early the next morning. She had not slept a wink, escaped the family breakfast. All she wanted was to see Rajan. He opened his door and, seeing her, stepped out. She fell against him, a sobbing bundle of wretchedness. He held her, silent, rubbing her back. After a while she calmed down. Rajan still held her. It was good to be held like that, restorative, calming.
After a while Rajan said,
‘It was Jag, right?’
She nodded. He nodded too.
‘I saw you drive past last night and I hoped you’d be OK. You want to talk about it?’
She did. They sat down on the bench outside his room and there she told him everything. There was no shame, no embarrassment, no indignity in telling Rajan because he did not condemn, did not judge, did not sneer. Did not say I told you so, though he had every right to do so. He was so – so big. And strong. She poured out the whole miserable story, holding back nothing, and spared no insults in castigating herself for her stupidity.
Rajan only said, ‘You’re not stupid, Rika. Just young and inexperienced. You don’t know what boys are like. Now you know.’
‘I’ll never get over this. Never.’
‘Yes you will. You will right here and now. Come with me.’
He got up and held out his hand; she took it and let him lead her out to the back, through the garden to the vegetable patch right at the very back, where he grew tomatoes and beans and pumpkins. He knelt down on the ground and beckoned for her to do the same, and she did. With his hands he scraped away at the loose black earth until he had made a shallow cavity, and then he turned to Rika.
‘Lay your hands in there,’ he said, and she did, and he covered them with earth.
‘Now, I’m going to leave you for a while. Just stay like this. Try to let all your misery run down into your hands and ask the earth to take it. That’s all. Whenever you feel a new wave of misery, just send it into the earth. The earth will heal you. I promise.’
And he got up and walked away, leaving her there, kneeling on the ground with her hands buried in the earth. The soil was slightly sun-warmed and moist. As Rajan had instructed, she gathered all her misery and sent it down through her arms and into her hands and fingers and down into the earth. After a while she realised it was happening all by itself. As if the earth was a sponge and sucking her anguish, all those tormented emotions, all the regret and shame and self-incrimination, out of her. Warm, and moist and absorbent. Yes: absorbent. Soaking it all up. Mopping up all the turmoil, all the sheer horribleness of the past night and the illusion – delusion – of the time before. And then another thing happened; mopped dry, she became the sponge, she the absorbent one, and what she absorbed and drew into herself was peace and trust and strength, rising up from the earth though hands and arms and into her very being.
And then something else happened. It happened in a split second, an instant of recognition, like a click inside her brain in which she saw, she knew, she understood. An image of Jag rose up within her, like a bubble. And she realised: he was never worthy of my love, for he did not love too. Love must meet love in equal portions. And in that moment of recognition the bubble of Jag popped. Just like that. He simply vanished. And in that moment she knew with all the power of the earth and the sky and the universe her own worth, and it was almighty, overwhelming, and true. In that instant she became a woman.
Later, she discussed it with Rajan.
‘… and yet, you know, when I was in love with him, at first, it felt so real, so true, so everlasting. How could it just disappear like that? Poof!’ She clicked her fingers to demonstrate the popping of the bubble.
‘The love was real, Rika; but Jag wasn’t. I think you were more in love with the idea of him. Being in love isn’t the same as love. Being in love is like the fizz in soda: just bubbles. So you felt all these bubbles rising up and you mistook them for the real thing. The real thing was the love, not the bubbles.’
She laughed. ‘Yes! A bubble! That’s all Jag really was. A bubble that popped.’
‘Exactly. Yet the love itself was real.’
‘You said boys are like that. But you aren’t, Rajan. How come?’
‘I should say most boys are like that, but really, who knows? Maybe some of them are only like that because they want to belong, because if they don’t follow the horde they’ll get laughed at and mocked.’
‘Like they laughed at and mocked you?’
‘Yes. See, I didn’t want to follow the horde and that’s always a dangerous thing. I didn’t want to talk about women in that degrading way, use that language, talk about scoring and busting cherry and all that. It was so much bluster. So I held back and that made me an outsider, less of a man in their eyes.’
‘I’m an outsider too. Jag said all the girls are doing it now. They all want it. How come I don’t? How come, Rajan? Maybe I am just frigid and abnormal like Jag said?’
‘You’re just you,’ said Rajan. ‘Everyone is different. If you don’t want it, then be strong in that. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. Be yourself. Even if all the girls are doing it, it doesn’t mean you have to if it’s not what you really want. People tend to follow the horde. Some people just want what e
verybody else tells them they should want. Not following takes strength.’
‘The earth gave me strength, Rajan. It did. It just kind of flowed into me. It was amazing!’ She looked at her hands as if in wonder; she had washed them at the stand-pipe in the garden, but there was still black earth beneath her fingernails. ‘My hands – they were like sensors, picking up all kinds of messages from the earth.’
‘Right,’ said Jag. ‘But really, you didn’t pick up anything. You simply let go of the things that weren’t right in you and then you became yourself again. That goodness you felt – it was in you all the time. You just had to let go of the things that blocked you from knowing your own goodness. You gave it to the earth. And then your own strength was revealed.’
‘It’s amazing. Just amazing,’ said Rika in wonder. ‘It’s as if that whole disaster never happened.’
‘But it did, and now you’re a bit wiser about the ways of men,’ said Rajan with a smile. ‘Most men, I should say. You’ll be wary in future; you’ll see. Be picky! And now – why not go upstairs and say hello to your grandma?’ He got up to go. She grabbed his wrist.
‘Wait,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘Tell me. Tell me now. I need to know. I need to know who it was my mother loved, and how she lost him.’
Rajan looked at her for what seemed an age, his face as still as stone; and then he softened, and said, ‘All right. I’ll tell you in a nutshell.’